After owning Manhunt 2 for quite some time (well, before Christmas), I finally decided that it was time to give it a play. I had picked the game up for the Wii for a variety of reasons, mainly because I loved the first Manhunt on the original Xbox but also because of all the uproar from the censors and the legal battle that finally resulted in the game hitting retailer shelves. Yeah, I had to see what all the fuss was about. I decided on the Wii version because this was where the majority of the tabloid hate was directed, mainly due to the motion controls being used to implement a variety nasty of executions, and because I could at least kid myself into believing that I was buying a current generation title.So, with everyone out of the house and the front room (home to my Wii mainly because as previously mentioned, Little Miss WLIG indulges in a bit of Wii Fit) available I decided to give it a go. The first thing that hits you is how outdated the game looks, it really looks like last generations graphics, and whilst the game suffered a year long delay I can't help but feel that this would still have been unacceptable when it was intended to be released. As this version is the edited version that finally got the green light for a release, all of the executions in the game are severely blurred, leaving your imagination to wonder what on Earth your trusts and shakes of the Wii remote and nunchuck are doing. A disappointment, but an expected one.
Where the game really fell flat was in the control scheme. A part of me wonders if Rockstar knew they where releasing this poor excuse for a game, broken. Stupid mistakes like putting a lean control onto the nunchuck, meaning that you have to play with the nunchuck upright all the time, not using the pointer so that you can actually look around, and making it feel like you're controlling a tank rather than a person, ruined this game. I played through the first level and vowed to trade it in the next day.
Here's my silver lining. I paid just under £10 for the game a few months back. Thanks to a good deal on trading in Wii games and a decent trade in price at Blockbuster, I got £12 store credit for it. I felt that I deserved those extra £2 after my brief yet traumatic play of the first level. So I traded it in and picked up Unreal Tournament III (UT3) for PS3 brand spanking new for only £12.99, an extra 99p out of my pocket. Am I glad I did that, UT3 is so very, very awesome. And I mean that in a huge guys with too much armour and guns that say I don't even need a penis, I have this, kind of way. And they do it well. The whole thing looks beautiful in a very gritty realistic manner and plays at a break neck speed. I haven't even touched the multiplayer yet, been having too much fun playing with the cunning AI bots. That alone blew me away, the fact that whilst not perfect, the AI was actually pretty decent. A rarity in this gaming climate. Plus, getting this on PS3 means that you get two add on packs for free, plus a whole wealth of community made stuff.
All I can say is thank you Manhunt 2, for being a complete pile of turd, without your broken controls and dated visuals, I would never have had you to trade in, and most likely wouldn't have picked up UT3. Every cloud has a silver lining, right?
Interesting. I played Manhunt 2 on the PS2 and then on the PSP, both times I felt like it was a very bland experience. The first Manhunt was visceral and there was a reason for the close up kills, it fitted in with the theme of you being forced to make a video nasty. Manhunt 2 was just wrong in every way and also very very broken.
ReplyDeleteAlso thanks for talking about UT3, I have seen this on the shelf of my local Gamestation for the longest time and wondered about it but no one has really talked about it, you've made up my mind to purchase it on the PS3 and give it a try.